Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 17th Apr 2008 18:54 UTC
Back in September 2003, when Red Hat discontinued its home-oriented Red Hat Linux desktop and offloaded that market to the community-driven but Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project, many people were left wondering if Red Hat would ever again offer a product aimed at home desktops. We have the answer now.
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Member since:
2005-11-18
Actually, I think this case has more to do with simple economics. Businesses roll out tens or hundreds of servers, with relatively high subscription fees. If support is needed for one server, there is a pretty wide margin to back it up. Even if you have many customers that only buy few licenses.
The consumer PC market is pretty much the opposite. Consumers are barely willing to shelve out 50 Euros. Subtract the development costs, and support costs, and there is nearly no profit margin to speak of. One support request from a consumer could blow away the profit margin for one or a few sales. Additionally, consumers are usually far less experienced with GNU/Linux systems than system administrators, so there is a higher probability that they will use customer support. Red Hat is a company, they want to make a profit, there is no profit here.
Some people argue that having some foothold in the (professional) desktop market tends to get a system onto servers. This is certainly true, Red Hat started with selling boxed GNU/Linux, and it probably helped them tremendously getting into the server market. But these days, there already is that free as in beer and freedom flavor, namely CentOS.